Oblivion is considered by many superior to skyrim regardless. I agree with that and think it would be a success adding it back. And the flag for theft system on the workshop wasn't put there for no reason.

Oblivion is considered by many superior to skyrim regardless. I agree with that and think it would be a success adding it back. And the flag for theft system on the workshop wasn't put there for no reason.

I actually agree that I found oblivion superior. Sure, the main story lines weren't as good, and the leveling system was really bad (the latter could be fixed through mods however). The side quests were a lot more fun.

The problem I see with an oblivion workshop, is the same as the nexus version of "neverwinter nights" is facing, compared to the NWNvault. That is, the older modders that did 90% of the mods for this "old" game simply aren't active anymore. And legally you can't upload their work elsewhere without permission. Thus only a rare few of the oblivion mods would carry over to the workshop.

As for that report flag, yes, I once thought it existed for a reason too. But there are several mods that I have reported months ago, and those mods are still there, with the "report flag" coloured orange still. My point is, the work of removing stolen mods isn't very effective. And if we got an oblivion workshop, with the problems mentioned above, my guess is that we would have a flood incoming of stolen mods - and it would be one heck of a lot of work to know which are stolen, and which ones are not when the original modders, as already mentioned, aren't active anymore.

That's the reason why I can still show my support for a workshop in newly released games, since it's a lot easier to check these things then. But for an old game that already have so many mods created from day 1? You would need an extremely diligent team that worked full time on investigating reports.

Oblivion's game engine would need an overhaul to fix a lot of bugs before this could be viable. BSA load ordering alone makes this unlikely to work unless the Workshop could be made to accept generic archives.

Right now, the state of Oblivion modding requires things to be packaged as loose files. There are numerous optional files available for a lot of mods, and plenty of them in formats the Workshop simply won't be able to deal with. Not to mention that a large number require things like OBSE, and Workshop users seem to despise that sort of thing.

I don't know how this even works on other games since I haven't authored any yet for other games that support it, but it seems to me that none of them support generic archives being uploaded without the use of the game's SDK.

Plus, as Amycus points out, the theft problem would only get worse. Bethesda has their hands full dealing with Skyrim as it is.